The greatest problem the planet faces today is global warming. And the greatest problem that humans face is their general inability to act together until just after a crisis hits.

America’s behavior at the onset of World War II would be a good example. Understandably reluctant to get re-involved in Europe’s self-destructive patterns of war, we ignored history’s recent lessons and waited too long, while many of our industrialists secretly made money by helping Hitler – and British PM Neville Chamberlain famously chose appeasement over facing the truth.

I chose this example because at FiRe 2011, our Future in Review CTO Design Challenge team decided that the solution to global warming would have to include real leadership, as the planet faced yet another “Churchillian moment.” More specifically, they found that:

Every year wasted in starting a real response would result in many years of harm later;

The response would have to be in phases, rather than a single immediate answer; and

It was still (at that time) possible to avoid the massive economic, biological, and human “climate refugee” dislocations of a 2-degree Centigrade global temperature increase.

In other words, the problem of global warming could indeed be solved, if we had real leadership on the issue.